Neil Shapiro: No easy answers after Aurora massacre

FIt was going to be a big weekend for Alex Sullivan, celebrating his 27th birthday by seeing Thursday's midnight screening of "The Dark Knight Rises" at the Century Cinema in Aurora, Colo., before marking his first wedding anniversary on Sunday.

But minutes into the film, he was dead, one of the 12 people slain by gunman James Holmes. Holmes, armed with an assault rifle, a high-capacity shotgun and pistols, also wounded 58 people, some critically, in a well-planned and methodical attack.

What makes Holmes' assault that much more troubling is the horrible sense of déj vu it engenders.

On Aug. 1, 1966, Charles Whitman, a former Marine attending the University of Texas, killed his mother and wife at their homes before heading for the university tower armed with a sawed-off shotgun, an M-1 carbine, a Remington 700 hunting rifle and a selection of other firearms. Ascending to the 28th story observation deck, he encountered a number of people, killing three. Mark Gabour, 16, and his aunt Marguerite Lamport, 56, were among them.

Once at the observation deck, Whitman fired at random targets below, killing 10, including Harry Walchuk, 39, a doctoral candidate and father of six who was browsing at a newsstand. Whitman wounded another 32 before his spree was ended by Austin police officer Houston McCoy, who shot him.

Shortly before 4 p.m. on July 18, 1984, unemployed security guard James Huberty entered a McDonald's in San Ysidro carrying an Uzi semi-automatic, a Winchester 12 gauge pump-action shotgun and a Browning 9mm. In the next 77 minutes, Huberty fired 257 rounds before he was killed by SWAT sniper Chuck Foster. Huberty killed 21 people — ranging from 8-month-old Carlos Reyes to 74-year-old Miguel Ulloa — and wounded another 19.

The United States doesn't hold a monopoly on such massacres.

A year ago, on July 22, 2011, Norway's Anders Behring Breivik detonated a large home-made bomb near Oslo's government buildings, killing eight and injuring at least 209, 12 of them seriously, before heading to Utoya Island, the location of a Labor Party youth camp, where, disguised as a police officer, he calmly hunted down and murdered 69 people, wounding another 110.

The full impact of the attacks cannot be appreciated by the simple numbers of dead and wounded. Each of the dead had, until that moment, a future, much like you and me. Many of the wounded suffered permanent physical injuries that changed forever not only their lives, but the lives of their families. Those who were present but avoided gunfire will never be the same.

You can see it in the faces of Aurora's survivors, elation that fate kept them unscathed, mixed with guilt that the very same fate did not spare the person next to them.

Add to that the terrifying loss of any sense that one can count on the natural order of things, that one can have control of one's circumstances. Not unlike watching someone die of cancer or seeing a fatal car accident, wondering "Why him" and "Why was I spared?"

We understandably search for explanations about how it happened, for missed clues of the imminence of such madness, and for changes we can make to our laws or societal structures that might reduce the risk of their reprise.

Sadly, the only explanation is that there really is no explanation. There are no telling clues. We don't know all that much about Holmes yet, but little has come to light that would predict his conduct.

The same is true of Breivik. His behavior before his assault was unremarkable. While Whitman was deeply troubled by the end of his parents' marriage, and Huberty, a survivalist, was angry at the government and at his financial circumstances, that hardly sets them apart from thousands of others.

These occasional paroxysms of violence lead inexorably to renewed calls for gun control.

But even the elimination of guns would not protect us from those bent on killing us. Breivik killed his first victims with an explosive device made from fertilizer, and we all remember Timothy McVeigh's April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City — also with a fertilizer-based explosive — that killed 168, including 19 children in a day care center, and injured 450. McVeigh carried no gun.

The harsh reality is we can neither anticipate nor prevent these seemingly inexplicable tragedies because they are, in truth, as inexplicable as they are inevitable.

We can only be thankful that today we were not shot, did not die of cancer, were not broadsided by a drunk driver. And we can make today count, for tomorrow could be very different.

Neil Shapiro is a Monterey lawyer who writes about legal issues and other topics for this page.